Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis.The heads of the CDC and NIH called the recently revealed STD experiments on Guatemalan prisoners during the 1940s by U.S. Public Health Service researchers “regrettable and deeply saddening.”
In an article published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the CDC’s Thomas Frieden and NIH’s Francis Collins say the unpublished research — which involved intentionally infecting prison inmates, soldiers, sex workers and the mentally incapacitated with syphilis and other STDs — clearly violated ethical standards.
They write that while this type of study wasn’t rare at the time, the investigators and their superiors knew that what they were doing was wrong, as evidenced by a 1948 letter noting that “if some goody organization got wind of the work [with the mentally ill], they would raise a lot of smoke.”
About 1,500 subjects were infected as part of the research, which was brought to the government’s attention only this summer, by a Wellesley College historian. For them, and for other victims of “past exploitations of vulnerable populations … the basic ethical principle of respect for persons was flagrantly violated,” Frieden and Collins write.
The two say that “regulations safeguarding humans participating in research have been enacted” since the studies were conducted, from 1946-48. Federally funded research projects that could expose human subjects to harm must be overseen by an institutional review board, and researchers are almost always required to get informed consent, they write.
Still, they write that “as clinical research increases in volume and complexity and more frequently crosses country borders — often to reach the most affected populations — continued scrutiny of guidelines governing research involving human subjects remains critical.”
Image: CDC/Dr. David Cox via Wikimedia Commons
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